The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [92]
The first Europeans to arrive in the Indian Ocean in numbers, and in an organised fashion, were the Portuguese. In one respect their attitude to trade and politics differed profoundly from what we have found for both emperors and port polity controllers around the shores of the ocean, for by claiming sovereignty over the ocean they claimed to be able to control and tax trade. In another respect they mirrored closely the position of the port polity controllers, but not the landed empires, in that the vast bulk of their revenue came from the sea, not from land. I have chosen to write rather extensively about the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. This is not to say that they had any profound effects there, but as so much of the historiography emphasises their actual or potential importance I have thought it necessary to locate them more correctly in their place and time. Such an analysis also casts much light on what else was happening, apart from the Portuguese presence, in the sixteenth century in the ocean.
The initial responses to the Portuguese varied from amazement to hostility to contempt. When the Kalabari people of the Niger Delta first saw white men, around 1500, they were perplexed.
The first white man, it is said, was seen by a fisherman who had gone down to the mouth of the estuary in his canoe. Panic-stricken, he raced home and told his people what he had seen: whereupon he and the rest of the town set out to purify themselves – that is to say, rid themselves of the influence of the strange and monstrous thing that had intruded into their world.
When the first Portuguese arrived in Colombo the locals reported to the king that
there is in our port of Colombo a race of people very white in colour and of great beauty; they wear jackets and hats of iron and pace up and down without resting for a moment. Seeing them eat bread and grapes and drink arrack, they reported that these people devour stone and drink blood. They said that these people give two or three pieces of gold or silver for one fish or one lime. The sound of their cannon is louder than thunder at the end of the world. Their cannon balls fly many leagues and shatter forts of stone and iron.9
The ethnocentric Ming Chinese accounts from the later sixteenth century depicted the Portuguese as malevolent goblins who acted completely outside norms of accepted behaviour. One said,
So they [the Portuguese] secretly sought to purchase children of above ten years old to eat.... The method [of preparing the child] was to first boil up some soup in a large iron pan and place the child, who was locked up inside an iron cage, into the pan. After being steamed to sweat, the child was then taken out and his skin peeled with an iron scrubbing-brush. The child, still alive, would now be killed and having been disembowelled, steamed to eat.10
The Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean with a background of equally fabulous ideas. Le Goff has written of the role of India and the Indian Ocean in medieval European thought. In these exotic fantasies there were fabulous riches, fearsome monsters, and even noble savages.11 The Travels of Sir John Mandeville circulated widely in Europe from the first half of the fourteenth century, including Portugal. His book is a curious mixture of 'fact' and 'fiction'. He said there were Christians and Jews in Malabar, and the tomb of St Thomas in Coromandel. He wrote about the pepper vine, and widow burning, but also of eels 30 feet long, and 5,000 islands in the ocean. He reported that Indians did not travel very much as they were under the planet Saturn. Some of the flavour of his account is given when he noted that Hurmuz was very hot:
But it is so hot there in that isle that men's ballocks hang down to their shanks for the great violence of the heat, that dissolves